Letter from the guest editors: distance education: promises and perils of teaching and learning online
✍ Scribed by Patricia Webb Peterson; Wilhelmina Savenye
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2001
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 23 KB
- Volume
- 18
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 8755-4615
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Debates about online distance education are useful in highlighting current struggles. When distance education enters the picture, a discipline has to rethink its commitments, its practices, and its assumptions. Suggesting that an online, first-year writing course be created, for example, can lead to heated discussions about institutional hiring practices, pedagogical goals, and proper teacher-student roles. Although distance education debates certainly point out the issues already sizzling in Composition Studies, these debates also bring in new concerns about the effects of changing learning, teaching, and writing practices.
The articles in this special issue, Distance Education: Promises and Perils of Teaching and Learning Online, focus on both parts of the debate: the "always alreadys" of disciplinary assumptions and the changing nature of conventions and practices. Susan Miller's lead article theoretically maps out the larger principles woven throughout our discussions about distance education, exploring how students' and teachers' identities must shift. Pointing to the changes that will or could occur when we move writing courses online, she contends that "composition studies needs a theorized preparation for shifts in pedagogy that distance courses make visible." The theoretical investigations begun by Miller are continued by Laura Brady and Patricia Webb Peterson in their articles. Brady uses the geological metaphor of fault lines-that is, places where movement occurs and changes the known landscape-to investigate three such rifts or surface irregularities created by distance-education courses: teachers' and students' access to technology, students' perceptions of teachers, and students' ability to stay in classes. Her study of a business writing class illustrates that the largest determining factors are the ubiquitous social and economic inequities. Webb Peterson addresses faculty members' fears about how they and students will change as distanceeducation courses are introduced into university curricula. She debunks some fears while pointing to theoretical issues to which all faculty-even those not interested in teaching online-should pay attention.
The issue then turns to the practical applications of the theories presented in the earlier articles. Wilhelmina Savenye, Zane Olina, and Mary Niemczyk offer concrete examples for Pergamon Computers and Composition 18 (2001) 319 -320